That was all my grandmother said before the village vigilante took us away – Nnabuike and I.
We had set fire to a man too drunk to remember the road to his house.
They called him “Highman”. I don’t know if the name had anything to do with his ability to get drunk at every turn. The village frowned at his special skills at deflating kegs of palm wine.
He lived in a bottle and people wondered what would happen to the liver of this middle-aged man when he is grown old.
He sat under the shade of a very generous tree talking to himself and smiling even. His pants were also wet, a product of his personal desecration of self.
He won every drinking contest and people despised him. Nevertheless, he didn’t care much. His mouth was sharper than the devil’s razor and he tore down things he couldn’t build with it. It was second to a worse encounter.
We were about 9 of age and we were honorably looking for the next festival of adventures, a tissue for our sorrows.
The village had gone to sleep after a very stressful Christmas day. Those who drove from different towns rested. Others moved into the bush to inspect their grandparent’s farms.
We, in turn, moved from house to house looking for things to spoil. It gave us so much pleasure seeing people grow restless.
In a village torn between Christianity and Traditional African Religion, Omu was as sacred as God.
We utilized its powers to instill fear in the hearts of many and made some knelt before their individual sanctuaries begging their Chi for forgiveness.
You see this drunken man, he had a terrible flair for not minding his business.
He had called Nnabuike the son of a womanizer and laughed hysterically like a mermaid of the 7th seas.
But the boy won’t take it.
Nnabuike’s attempt to tickle his ears with a turkey feather was met by a weak grip from his drunken palm and in turn, opened a floodgate of verbal tantrums from the decibel that was his mouth.
“I am not your mate. If your mother had agreed, I would have been your father. But she made the wrong choice and married a lazy man who enjoys the company of wide-legged women more than he loves himself”
“Do you know when we were in Panya with all the beautiful women, your father was there too. He had the nerve of a pig; the biggest little. One night, thunder struck him peeping while a woman was bathing”
He concluded his feeble tales with a laugh and angered the boy in no small measures.
Nnabuike needed to act. It was his right to. I was there urging him on because that is what friends do.
He unzipped his trousers and brought out his sprinkler and began bathing the drunken man with urine.
The drunken man retaliated but he was too weak to be fast and only succeeded in chasing us to a short distance while he danced like a flame disturbed by the wind towards a path he thought led to his home.
We followed through, walking along a lonely dry path made of sole roughing stone before Nnabuike pushed the man into a pile of dry grass used for thatching a mud house and I lit the match that nearly consumed him.
To be continued…..
Chai. Very mischievous children you guys were.
You can say that again